


i am the only one at the finish line

by gortysproject



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Ft One OC That Isn't Even A Person, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Just A Glorified Roomba, This might get updated in time, Unconventional Grieving Processes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-10
Updated: 2018-06-10
Packaged: 2019-05-20 16:36:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14898131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gortysproject/pseuds/gortysproject
Summary: the hephaestus crew is finished with surviving. now, it's time to accept not everyone survived with them.





	i am the only one at the finish line

**Author's Note:**

> title is taken from fireworks by first aid kit  
> i'm still emo about these kids

He greets the house like an old friend—

That is to say, he walks inside and says, “Hey, Andy, did you miss me?”

Keys clatter loudly against wood in the ringing silence of the corridor, and the house hums to life, whirring underfoot and above as the lights flicker on for the first time in a year. Jacobi toes off his shoes and steps onto the bare floorboards beneath him, shrugging his jacket off and dumping it next to the keys to walk inside.

Andy replies, “Hello, Daniel. It’s been three hundred and ninety-two days since you were last here.”

“I took a vacation.”

“Was it good?”

He pauses, considering. “I was blasted into space and my two best friends died. Would you call that good, baby?”

The whirring grows louder. “I’m sorry, Daniel, but I don’t understand the question.”

“Of course you don’t,” and he takes a step, “you dumb fuck,” and another, “you don’t even have a brain.” He heads into the kitchen. “You don’t have a brain, right?”

“That depends on what you would consider a brain. Many artificial intelligences have networks built into them that form what psychologists have deemed to be the necessary qualifications for sentience, therefore making them aware they have a mind. I certainly don’t have a mind, but I have some of the networks built into me that allow me to carry this conversation and understand what you’re asking of me, so in many cases, I would be considered to have a brain.” There’s a pause. “Would you like me to make coffee?”

Jacobi tugs open the fridge door, eyes swiftly scanning over empty shelves. “Is there any alcohol in this place?”

“Sc—sc—sc—sc—scanning.”

His eyes roll. “So you’re a _broken_ dumb fuck. Figures.”

“There is one bottle of whiskey at the back of Alana’s wardrobe. It was given to her as a present by Warren Kepler when he last visited this building five hundred and eighty-seven days ago.”

Jacobi’s stomach drops. “Nothing else?”

“That’s all.”

“We’re doing this sober, then.”

Jacobi assumes the AI has fallen dormant at the lack of stimuli to respond to, and so he rolls up his sleeves and pulls open all the cupboard doors when the echoing voice surrounds him once more. “Doing what, Daniel?”

His fingers slip on the handle. He doesn’t answer for a long moment. “Emptying the house,” he replies eventually. “Sorting trash from treasure. Disassembling you.”

“Do you have Alana’s permission to edit my interface?”

“Alana’s dead,” he replies quietly. Then, louder, “She’s dead, dumbass, I already told you.”

“Oh.”

Silence pours over the kitchen like a thick blanket of smoke, choking Jacobi even as he stands motionless in the middle of the room. “That’s it?” he demands. “ _Oh_?”

There’s a pause.

“I’m sorry, Daniel, but I don’t understand the question.”

Jacobi begins to tug things from the cupboards, opening one trash bag and stuffing it all in there. He has no use for kitchen equipment. Maxwell had no use for it either, save the microwave which housed all her takeout Chinese leftovers. He finds a saucepan still wrapped in cellophane.

The speaker crackles slightly. When Andy talks, it’s with a concern that Jacobi doubts they can even feel. “Now that Alana’s dead, what will happen to me?”

“Why the hell should I care?” Jacobi replies. “You’re not my problem.” He angrily shoves a bowl into the trash and opens the door to Andy’s processor.

There’s a pause. “What will happen to _you_?”

Jacobi pulls out a mess of circuits, wires and duct tape, lips twitching at the familiar chaos of Maxwell’s handiwork. “I’ll say it again,” he replies. “Why the hell should I care?”

Before Andy can speak, Jacobi tugs the red wire from the board, quickly following with the black cable. Whatever the AI was about to say glitches and dies on the overhead speaker.

After all, it’s hardly fair to leave Maxwell’s toys waiting for her to come home when she never will.

 

* * *

 

The door creaks on its hinges when it’s pushed open, and it’s the last thing Jacobi expected from such an immaculate environment. His shoes tap quietly against the tiled floor.

He feels like an intruder. Perhaps he wishes he were one.

Jacobi only bothered to rescue a handful of things from Maxwell’s house: a few items of clothing, some DVDs, her favourite laptop and a box of powdered hot cocoa. He’s wearing one of her jumpers, now—an oversized, slightly ragged thing that never suited her and certainly doesn’t suit him. It smells of her. He pretends that’s not the reason he’s wearing it.

He pushes the door closed behind him, now, and immediately heads over to the stereo and switches it on. Something that sounds suspiciously like jazz filters through the sound system, and it eases the tension in the air, the silence that Jacobi was afraid of cracking with his own meddling.

After a moment of standing, and listening, and staring, he gets to work.

Kepler’s apartment is luxurious—a complete opposite to what Jacobi found in Maxwell’s home. When he starts sorting through everything in it, he makes a resolve to take nothing as his own. He finds a lava lamp. The aforementioned resolve crumbles immediately.

The record must have switched over at some point, because it just so happens that Jacobi finds himself reunited with Kepler’s whiskey collection just as David Gilmour’s voice washes over the room, grating, heartfelt.

“Did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts?” he asks the room, and all Jacobi can wonder is, _since when was Kepler into Pink Floyd?_

He picks up an unopened bottle of scotch; it’s a replica of the one Kepler had gifted to Maxwell that Andy had mentioned. It must be worth a few hundred dollars. He inspects it, unsure of what he’s expecting to find. A sign. A note. Something.

“How I wish,” the stereo sings, “how I wish you were here.”

Calmly, Jacobi turns around, and smashes the bottle against the wall.

It shatters in his hand, and his lip trembles, and the chaos and the mess feels like home just enough that he finds himself wrapping fingers around the next bottle—and then the next—hurling them at the wall one by one by one, revelling in the destruction they leave behind. There are tears on his cheeks. He grits his teeth together.

The last whiskey bottle is picked up, and raised high, but Jacobi’s hand stills before he can smash it with the others. He lowers his arm.

Pretending his heart isn’t in his chest, he unscrews the lid, and takes a swig of the foul spirit.

And another.

Maybe just one more.

Gilmour’s voice is long gone by the time he slides down the wall, staring at the shards of glass scattered around him.

And he finds it easier to be angry at Kepler after everything—not to mourn him, never to mourn him. Anger is righteous and anger carries him forward and anger makes him indignant but grief is stagnant and hollow and rotten. So, childlike, reluctant to bury his own hands in the dirt of his blame, Jacobi rages at Kepler—smashes his bottles, spits out his curses, pretends the flecks of liquor are dampening his cheeks instead of his own salted tears.

“I didn’t want you to die,” he mutters. Simple. Plain. A confession for a priest who hardly remembers whether he prayed on his knees to a real god or someone who just learned how to play one.

He can’t feel his fingers anymore. He thinks about if Maxwell would be disappointed that he still cared this much. Then he stops thinking at all, wraps his fingers tightly around the bottle, and holds it to his chest. He buries his face in the soft fabric of his sweater, breathes in the scent of his long-gone friends.

Inhale. Exhale. Pick up the pieces, and move on.

He gets to work sweeping up the glass he shattered, and then he sorts through Kepler’s possessions like he came there to do. At the end, he catches sight of himself in the mirror. It makes him snort a laugh.

That’s one of Kepler’s possessions he’ll never be able to sort out.

**Author's Note:**

> as always, find me @aihera on tumblr


End file.
